Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Foreword / Paget Henry xi
Introduction to the American Edition / Robert Lipsyte xvii
A Note on Cricket xxiii
Preface xxvii
Part One. A Window to the World
1. The Window 3
2. Against the Current 21
3. Old School-tie 39
Part Two. All the World's a Stage
4. The Light and the Dark 49
5. Patient Merit 66
6. Three Generations 72
7. The Most Unkindest Cut 82
Part Three. One Man in His Time
8. Prince and Pauper 101
9. Magnanimity in Politics 117
10. Wherefore Are These Things Hid? 128
Part Four. To Interpose a Little Ease
11. George Headley: Nascitur Non Fit 139
Part Five. W. G.: Pre-Eminent Victorian
12. What Do Men Live By? 151
13. Prolegomena to W. G. 159
14. W. G. 171
15. Decline of the West 186
Part Six. The Art and Practic Part
16. "What Is Art?" 195
17. The Welfare State of Mind 212
Part Seven. Vox Populi
18. The Proof of the Pudding 225
19. Alma Mater: Lares and Penates 253
Epilogue and Apotheosis 257
Index 263

About the Author

C. L. R. James (1901–89), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and prolific writer, was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals. He is the author of a renowned study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), and a play, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934), which is published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“It's a measure of James's value as a writer that a case can be made that Beyond a Boundary is one of the best books about a sport ever written, and yet it's hard to imagine anyone placing it among the three or four most important books that James wrote. It is, however, well worth reading, because of what it tells us about James' political development, and because of its much broader lessons about sports.”
*Socialist Worker*

"Beyond a Boundary . . . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway."
*New York Times Book Review*

“Delightful and lively, full of vivid, detailed descriptions of players and play. . . .  I doubt I'll ever sit through an entire test match, but if you told me I could only keep a half-dozen sports books, this would probably be one of them.”
*Deadspin*

"As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a focus for group effort and individual performance. . . . [In] his scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme."
*Washington Post*

"A work of double reverence—for the resilient, elegant ritualism of cricket and for the black people of the world."
*The New Yorker*

"Beyond a Boundary is a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popular culture in the Western and colonial world."
*The Nation*

"Beyond a Boundary is . . . first and foremost an autobiography of a living legend—probably the greatest social theorist of our times."
*Journal of Sport & Social Issues*